


self into mythology

by underscored



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Causality, Multi, Mythologizing, Occupation, Revolution, Sort Of, The Long Winter, The Problem of Susan, Women Being Awesome, time displacement
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:13:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24968029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underscored/pseuds/underscored
Summary: A snarl is already building as she lurches up, head throbbing as she scrambles for purchase in her suddenly entirely impractical shoes. She takes in the snow, the pines, the morning sun creeping like blood over the landscape, the bitterness of the wind, and sheknows.She takes it all in, shudders overtaking her, and is suddenly engulfed by a wave of pure, unadulterated rage.“Absolutely fucking not.”Susan falls in a London street, and rises in a Narnian snowbank. She is decidedly displeased about this.
Comments: 51
Kudos: 137





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is something that maps onto a much larger, very intricate narrative idea I have about the years directly before and during the Winter, connected to something I've been writing in my head for ages in moments of boredom. This story ignores The Last Battle, because it's an awful ending.

It almost doesn’t happen, is the thing. She thinks about this later, on dark nights when the snow-heavy clouds cover all the stars; or when she learns that pyres aren’t traditional in Narnia, they’re just the only way to get rid of all the bodies when the ground has been frozen solid for ten straight years; or in the moments after she sees the Witch for the first time again. The whole thing almost doesn't happen.

She can’t thank him, exactly. Honestly, if she’d woken up in London she would have made his life exceedingly unpleasant. Men like him, men who pull women into side streets at dusk, only understand one thing, which is why she began carrying a slim baton with her at all times when she first moved to Kensington on her own. For all the good it does her: a jerk on her wrist pulls her off balance, a patch of wet stone ruins her footing, and the heavy wooden door behind her ends her participation in the entire encounter before it even really begins.

When she wakes, her head aches, and there’s the sickly sensation (one she hasn’t felt in years and would honestly have been perfectly fine never experiencing again) of her own blood drying in her hair. Aside from that, though, she’s cold, much colder than even November in London warrants.

It’s clearly not cobblestones beneath her knees, and unless she’s been lying in that alley for far longer than she imagines possible, there’s far too much snow. There’s a scent, too, a scent on the air that feels so familiar, but one she can’t remember experiencing since she was twelve, the first and worst time.

A snarl is already building as she lurches up, head throbbing as she scrambles for purchase in her entirely impractical shoes. She takes in the snow, the pines, the morning sun creeping like blood over the landscape, the bitterness of the wind, and she _knows_. She takes it all in, shudders overtaking her, and she is suddenly engulfed by a wave of pure, unadulterated rage.

“Absolutely fucking not.”

She breathes in deep, wincing at the way the air burns her throat and lungs. For a moment, just a moment, Susan considers if maybe she actually is in that desperate little alley, bleeding out from a head wound and hallucinating this whole disaster. The thought is comforting. It is, alas, only a momentary thought. She’s crossed worlds enough times now to know what it feels like, and none of the many dreams she’s had about this scenario ever felt like anything more than dreams. This, though, _this_ is real, as real as the first brush of pines on her hair had been the first time, or the surf beneath her feet the second and last. There's no use pretending otherwise, as much as she might like to: Peter's right, she's always been entirely pragmatic, perhaps too much so.

That little existential crisis out of the way, she barks out something between a scream and a laugh and stomps to the nearest rise, cursing her dress and hose as they fight a pathetic battle against the knee-deep snow. The frustration builds, lining her throat with rage and disbelief as she shouts, “In the winter!” She'd stomp her foot, if she wasn't already aware that the action would be totally lost in the snow. Instead, she settles for casting her frustration at a random bit of sky and pine needles above her. “Just dumping me here seems a bit petty, even for you!”

A pause and … nothing. Not that she expects it, honestly. She has never gotten much more than silence from the Lion, and it would be entirely out of character for him to start being helpful now. No, of course he has nothing to say to her. He'd barely had anything to say to her the last time he banished her from her home, and she'd been willing to trust him back then. He's certainly not said anything to her since unceremoniously dumping the four of them back in England, and even when Ed and Lucy got whisked away to go sailing, there had been no messages for the Gentle Queen, who had all the while been losing that carefully constructed gentleness even as she honed it into the only weapon she could still use in her new world. No. She's on her own.

It’s tempting to start shouting again, but her throat already hurts, and she’s long ago given up the habit of intentionally harming herself to spite others. Besides, she thinks reasonably, willing the rage to recede, if she conserves her voice now, she may get to shout at an actual person later, and that’s a comforting thought. Still.

“There had better be,” she snarls at the trees again, casting them a baleful look for good measure, “a bloody good reason for this.”

\---

As it turns out—to her extreme and lasting displeasure—there is.


	2. Chapter 2

By the time she actually finds someone, hours after the whole mess begins, she is beginning to worry that the concussion she is certain she has—and yes, she realizes that she’s somehow managed to slam her head against that damned door, before slamming into the ground here—combined with the oncoming hypothermia, might actually, finally kill her. God, what a mess that would be. She and her family haven’t been speaking much lately, particularly since Edmund figured out what she’s been up to with Tommy Wentworth in Mayfair, not that he has any damn room to judge. Still, they will notice if she just disappears entirely.

Well. Eventually.

And the land isn’t helping either. It’s- she knows where she is. Of course she does. Twelve years in exile and a probable concussion and a little snow aren’t enough to blind her from where she is. She had given it all up, wrapped it in the deepest, quietest part of her mind and put it to rest, trying to preserve herself and the memory of this place, of her former ( _real_ ) life, but it’s not gone. She knows Narnia, knows how the air tastes, how the wind and earth feel in her hair and beneath her feet. There’s a strangeness: variations on the theme she felt the first time she waded through knee-high snow into a world she couldn’t believe could exist; or the second time, when everything felt sun-blasted and too bright. This strangeness is new, however: the world around, despite being blanketed in unending white and scored by freezing winds, feels deeper, darker, _stronger_. Something twists deep within her at the sensation, new and almost-familiar as it is.

She knows this world, but not this time.

It still hurts.

Being in Narnia again still hurts, throws open all the doors she’d adamantly closed years ago, as she’d tried to find a way to live in a world that had no space for her, tried to warp the rage and deep, aching loss into something useful, rather than the yawning pit inside her it had been for so long when her family had first been thrown out. In the end, the only way she’d found to salvage what was left of herself was to bury most of what they had been, and what Narnia had been to all of them. Like cutting off a limb to escape a bear trap, she’d carved out the things she’d needed to in order to stem the bleeding.

It hurt then, and every day since, in a small, echoing way, but Susan’s a survivor. Everyone has always said so. Even Peter, though the word had never felt like curse so much as it had the first time he said it after the debacle with Caspian, when she refused to sink into the saccharine nostalgia her siblings had been able to swim through with such apparent ease, but that had always felt to her like the slowest, most horrific form of drowning. _You always were a survivor, Su. What’ll you throw out next?_

She shakes her head, banishing Peter’s specter. She _is_ a survivor. After everything they’ve lost, everyone she’s failed, her own life often feels like the only thing left she can save. And she won’t fucking lose it here.

A flash of black and a low snarl announce her salvation from both her horrible spiral of thought and that ignominious fate, just before she’s flung into yet another snow bank. This time, though, there’s an incredibly angry Panther on top of her.

A sharp pain lances through her entire body as the back of her head slams to the ground once more, vision briefly blacking out. When the world spirals back into focus, the Panther’s head entirely fills her sight horizon. The light prickle of deadly claws—nowhere near what someone this size can summon, she knows, and if they wanted her dead, she’d already be bleeding out into the pristine snow—is enough to force her to focus, even through the waves of bone-deep aches rippling through her. Susan doesn’t want to die here. She won’t. Her head aches and the tiny bite of ten claws in her shoulders pricks a warning and the cold seeping through wool and cotton spreads across her back and the only thing—the _only_ thing—she can hold in her head now is that she won’t fucking die like this. It’s not much, but it’s enough.

Her vision stops wavering, and through the aching cold, she summons a shuddering breath.

“ _Who are you?_ ” The Panther’s snarl is velvet, lighter than Susan expects, given the Cat’s size, and the pitch of the predator’s voice combined with the weight—lighter, much lighter than it should be—is what tips her off that this one can’t be long out of her juvenile years, which, judging by the ribs she can see pressing against the black coat with every gusting inhale, have been harder than they should have been. Still, to Susan’s chilled body, the danger comes with a small blessing of warmth, helping pull her from the blackness the cold and pain are dragging her into.

The pinpricks in her shoulders and upper arms sharpen, and her moment of reorientation is over. In newly informed vision, though, the Panther’s eyes seem wilder, driven by uncertainty rather than true anger, and Susan can’t say whether that’s good or bad for her. “Who. Are. You.”

“Just a traveler.” She puts every ounce of energy and calm she can muster into pitching her voice low, injecting a gentleness she doesn’t feel into the tone. With one or two very notably exceptions that, she’s always insisted, prove the rule, she does not deal well with children of any kind. Children present an expectation, a _need_ she neither wants nor feels capable of fulfilling. Still, she’s capable enough to fake the calm she can’t actually feel and, hopefully, but this Cat enough at ease to keep most of her blood in her body where it belongs, at least until she can figure out what the fuck is going on here. “Just a lost traveler, I swear.”

Wrong answer, apparently, because those claws are actually beginning to hurt. Susan doesn’t want to end up losing an arm, either.

“There are no travelers these days. Not from the west. Not from _anywhere_.”

The words and the ache behind them don’t take her breath away—the Cat’s full weight on her shoulders and the frozen ground have already taken care of that—but they do twist the small ball of unease in her stomach tighter. Another invasion, maybe. Edmund and Lucy had fallen into Narnia while Caspian was still alive, but it’s been years, now, and past experience has taught her vividly how little the passage of time in England means to this place. This could be ten years after any of them were last here, or a thousand. That thought hurts too much, so she pushes it away. She's seen two ages in this world. She doesn't need to see a third.

“Look.” Her breath is coming shorter now, tearing at her chest, and she can’t tell if it’s the cold or the Panther on top of her or the concussion or the shock finally catching up to her, but it’s becoming a serious possibility that she will lose consciousness _again_ if at least one of these elements doesn’t change immediately, and she’s had enough of the void for one afternoon. “I’m just a traveler. I’m lost, I-“

“No one is ‘just lost’ in Narnia.”

The blackness on her vision is narrowing, framing the Panther’s snarling face and yellow eyes in a quickly shrinking border. Nothing for it then. “I swear by the Lion, I’m just a traveler.”

Between one moment and the next, the Cat is gone, taking with her both her damned claws and the blessed body heat, and Susan can breathe again. Somewhat. Pulling ice-sharp air into her struggling lungs, she levers herself up, unwilling to remain on the ground when those claws are so close to her throat. With a lurch, she makes it first to her knees and then, after a painful breath, into a huddled standing position, leveling a glare at the shocked-looking Panther as she does so. Her back is soaked now, and both shoulders are beginning to ache. “Really?”

If the Panther even notices the edge of sarcasm in her voice, she gives no notice. Instead, body tense as if poised to flee and eyes wide, she whispers, “You swear by the Lion you mean no harm? You swear on the Deep Magic?”

There’s a moment in which she considers brushing it off, telling the young Panther what she wants to hear and moving on. She’s- not sceptical. She’s seen the Deep Magic, seen it and felt it and dreamed of it for years. But she’s always hated the awe with which most Narnians speak of the Deep Magic. They wouldn’t talk like that if they’d seen it. No one talks about blood on the edge of a knife, or darkness at the edges of stars, with that kind of reverence. The Deep Magic isn’t beautiful, or glorious, or wonderful. It’s dark and terrible and inevitable. It’s the words that destroy cities, or the deal that trades death for life without telling you which one is which. It’s cold stone and sharp knives and teeth in the night.

It’s also real, and even she is wary about swearing false oaths on a thing like that.

Which is why Susan, instead of blithely promising, says instead, “I can’t promise I mean no harm at all. I almost certainly mean harm to _someone_ here, given the state of things. But I mean no harm to you, or to Narnia. I will swear that.”

The Panther is silent for a long moment, her eyes conflicted, gaze darting between Susan, the pale afternoon sun, and the western horizon. Wrapping her arms around herself in an attempt that even she recognizes as pathetic, Susan waits. She'll swear something more exacting, if she must, though if the Panther waits long enough, Susan may actually succumb to hypothermia and save them both the trouble.

Finally, something shifts, and the Cat says, “I’ll have to take you to the outpost. They’ll know what to do.”

At the word _outpost_ , Susan breathes deeply and almost smiles. An outpost indicates shelter, warmth, information. Someone with opposable thumbs and a flint, perhaps, or even a cloak she can borrow. She can figure out when she is and why once she stops herself from freezing to death.

With a last, somewhat confused gaze to the west, the Cat turns, dipping her head in Susan’s direction. “Follow me. We’ll have to move fast.”

“You don’t need to stay?” She wrenches one arm from her trembling torso and gestures vaguely around them: she has a sneaking suspicious the Panther is supposed to be patrolling … _something_. She’d found Susan, after all.

The Cat, however, snorts, the first real sign of levity she’s shown yet. “Like I said. There are no travelers in Narnia these days.”

And she’s off again, padding lightly over the snow. Susan lets herself be envious for a moment, just a moment, before she, too, starts for the east. She’s tired and in pain, and is just now beginning to realize that she’d lost sensation in her extremities sometime since being knocked into the snow for the second time in her brief stint back in her homeland. Still, now that she’s at least momentarily safe from being mauled to death by a scared juvenile, the bright edge and narrow focus of emergency has receded, leaving the deep, twisting ache of _something wrong_ , and that bright, banked rage.

There may be no travelers in Narnia these days, but she's here, somehow. And here in Narnia, even in the biting cold, even alone and with this strangeness surging around her, there’s a bright, sharp joy, too, as all the things she’s tucked away and buried to keep safe over the years start to unfurl themselves.


	3. Chapter 3

“If you don’t get me somewhere warmer soon, I am going to freeze to death, no matter how much I’d rather avoid that.”

Her taciturn guide, who has slowly but surely been pulling further and further ahead of her as the cold seeps further into Susan’s bones, barely acknowledges her words, but even the minute snarl of derision is enough to spark her temper. She didn’t ask to be dropped back here, much less in the middle of this godforsaken winter. No- she had sworn she would never let herself be dragged back into this again, sworn that if Aslan thought he could rip her back and forth between worlds with impunity as he had before, he would soon learn differently. And yet, here she is.

It’s going to be infuriating if she freezes to death before she gets to share her thoughts on the Lion’s most recent intrusion into the life she’s managed to scrape back together for herself.

“You can’t question me if I freeze to death.” A weak argument, but true. She spins it out in the wheedling tone Edmund used to use when he wanted something from her, or when he wanted to make Lucy laugh. She used to bring it out from time to time on her own counselors when they were being particularly unreasonable, or when she really didn’t want to go another round with Lune’s overzealous trade delegation. It’s not something she uses in her life now, but every tool has its uses.

Its use here is, apparently, to annoy the hell out of the as-yet nameless Panther, because it’s that complaint, in that tone, that finally makes the Cat stop her forward stalk and snap, “If you chose to come here in that gear, it’s hardly my fault.”

Susan pauses for a moment, drawing a breath in slowly in hopes that will help the air warm before it hits her aching lung. It doesn’t, but it does slightly help her cage the words she wants to say: that she didn’t choose this, didn’t choose _anything_. That, as usual when it comes to this world, her choices have been made for her. But it’s not this Panther’s fault, and she can’t help Susan soothe the sting of another world suddenly pulled out from under her to be replaced with another.

All she can do is help Susan not freeze to death before she’s had a chance to address the issue with the one who is to blame.

“That may be true,” she says instead, carefully gentle. “But your fault or mine, it won’t stop me freezing.” As if to support her, the wind picks up again, snapping the hem of her coat against her calves. It send another shiver up her spine; the march through the frozen surroundings is just enough to raise a sweat, but the temperature is low enough to freeze it on the outer layer of her clothing, and even as the trek becomes steadily more difficult, Susan has begun to feel the deeper threat of the cold creeping over her more intensely. She won't play up her concern to this stranger, but even a fool unfamiliar with human biology should be able to see the dangerous territory she's entering.

Yellow eyes stare here down over a few yards of snow for a long moment, but the steady tone combined with her obviously declining condition must do _something_ , because the Panther finally gusts a sigh and says, “If you can keep up, there will be a fire.”

\---

There is, in fact, a fire.

There’s also an aggressively armed Satyr clutching a spear huddled next to it, and a very large Raven perched on a frozen log just outside its radius of warmth, but for the moment she can’t spare them a thought because every bit of attention she has is focused on getting as close to the small fire as possible without either falling into it (easier said than done, with how numb her feet and legs are) or startling one of the three enough to bite or stab her. It’s a delicate balance, made all the more difficult by how violently she’s shaking. Even with her mind occupied with thoughts of how to best position herself for maximum warmth, and her hands playing a delicate game of being almost but not quite in the flames, she has just enough wherewithal to hear the Raven’s startled croak and catch the glimmer of the Satyr’s large hunting knife being loosened from its sheath.

It’s not the warmest welcoming committee Susan’s ever had, but nor is it the most suspicious greeting she’s received, not by a long shot. She has, to put it lightly, been around more dangerous individuals than these, and it's going to take more than an angry bird and a paranoid Satyr to keep her away from what little warmth she thinks she can get from this small fire.

There’s a moment where she imagines all four are posed in a strange, frozen tableau: Susan desperately trying to warm herself on the meager fire, the Satyr trying to determine which weapon will be the most effective to dispatch her, the Raven waking from a seeming half-doze summoning its words, her Panther guide considering how to regain a semblance of control over the stranger she brought to her fellows. All of them, frozen in the swiftly falling dark. It’s ridiculous, and sad, and if all of Susan’s energy weren’t currently being used to suppress her tremors, she would laugh.

The Raven recovers first, ruffling ragged feathers and shifting on the log slightly before turning a scathing eye to her erstwhile guide. “What’s this then, Dragma?”

At his tone, Susan can see the Panther—Dragma, apparently—shift uneasily. “I, I found her near the Western Border. She isn’t supposed to be here, but I didn’t know …” she trails off casting a beseeching gaze at the Satyr, whose hand, Susan notices, has now actually drawn his hunting knife. So the Panther _was_ a border scout of some kind, and was decidedly not supposed to leave her post. “I didn’t know what to do! No one has ever just shown up before!”

“Hmmm.” The Raven tilts his head and aims one beady eye at Susan as she huddles closer to the fire. It reminds her, irritatingly, of the old Centaur who had run the restored Archives during the first ten years or so of her family's reign. Edmund had spilled ink once, she remembers, just _once_ , on an agricultural yield index he'd taken out for comparison to modern yields, and the old bastard had watched him with exactly this suspicious gaze for the rest of his tenure. Susan hadn't liked the look then, aimed at her brother, and she doesn't like it now.

She can’t help it. “What,” she snaps, “never seen someone on the verge of freezing to death before?”

The Raven blinks. From the corner of her eye, she can see the Satyr blanch.

“We should just have done with her, Eirit.” His voice is much louder than Susan’s, harsher, as if he’s not quite certain himself of his own surety in what he’s saying, and is making up for lack of belief with volume. She turns her stare to him, her brows rising. There have been harsh times in Narnia, certainly, and there were days when her family’s borders were closely patrolled, but she doesn’t think even the Telmarines were in the habit of summarily executing whoever they happened to find wandering around. His eyes flicker to her face before darting back to the Raven. “We don’t have time for anything else. We’ve already been out here too long. It’s nearly night, and who knows who she might be, or who she’s reporting to?”

And that’s- that’s absolutely ridiculous. It’s one thing for Dragma—whom Susan can tell even from their brief interaction is too young and inexperienced to know reality from imaginings when it comes to strange happenings on her first solo patrol—to think she’s a spy of some sort. But these two, Eirit and whoever this Satyr is, are clearly plenty old enough to know better. This isn’t Calormen, damn it. Even in the most dangerous times during their reign, she and Edmund had never so much as inched toward this line. It would have been too much like ... well, too much like Jadis. Apparently it's been long enough that Narnia has forgotten that.

“As I’ve already told this one,” she begins, jerking her head in Dragma’s general direction, loathe to turn her face awake from the paltry warmth she’s found, “I’m just a traveler. I didn’t mean to come to Narnia, and I certainly-“

“Could be right, Martil. Could be right. Hmmm.” The Raven hops closer. “Not the way it used to be done, of course, and the Queen would never have allowed it. But these days. Hmm.”

At the mention of a queen, Susan briefly, violently, sees red. She’s going to ruin whoever sits on the throne these days, whoever allowed Narnia to become this suspicious, this frightened of its own shadow. She’s not here to interfere, and there’s still a part of her that insists she doesn’t want to be here at all, and wouldn’t, of her own volition, but she didn’t let her family and herself bleed for decades to let the land they would have died to protect end up this broken shell of itself. She’s going to figure out what sorry excuse for a queen sits on the throne, go to Cair Paravel, and she’s going to ruin them.

She’s fixed bigger problems than this before. Never alone, not really, but she’s gotten used to having no one but herself to rely on. She can handle one weak queen, even without the rest of her family to secure her authority.

“Who rules in Cair Paravel?”

The Raven scoffs, tilting his head to eye her more closely. “If she’s a spy, she’s the worst I’ve ever heard of.”

“She did say she was lost,” Dragma offers, the first real contribution she’s made to this conversation since it began, and it’s almost enough to make Susan warm to her. That is quickly quenched, however, when the Panther adds, “but I guess any spy would say that if they were caught.”

“From Archenland, maybe?” The Satyr’s voice is quieter now, but the same severity runs beneath it. On his spear, Susan can see his hand clench.

“No one’s enough of a fool to risk crossing the mountains now, and besides, how’d she get to Lantern Waste, then?”

Susan’s patience fails her. “I’m sorry, is my ignorance amusing to you?” Even as she is, confused and angry and possibly concussed and quickly overcoming the burst of warmth she’d found near the fireside, she can infuse enough righteous authority into her voice to make them look at her again, rather than squabbling with each other. “As I told your friends here, I haven’t been in Narnia since I was a child.” It’s not _exactly_ a lie, after all. It has been years since she was last here, and she had been a child according to at least one timeline during the whole disaster with Caspian. “How am I to know?”

“See, and that makes no sense, either. You’re not old enough- if you’d truly been to Narnia as a child, even a very young child, you would know.”

“I’m older than I look,” she forces out, gritting her teeth to stop them chattering and glaring at the Satyr: Martil, she thinks. “Who. Rules.”

An odd silence falls over everything for a moment. Martil makes a strange sound deep in his throat, and Dragma's breath suddenly comes in rapid bursts. The Raven is still silent, but his gaze is different now, almost confused. The wind makes its appearance in the small camp, whipping around the small fire, and as it throws sparks up into the sky, Susan realizes just how deeply into twilight they've sunk.

“No one rules.” Eirit ruffles his feathers and finally, finally looks away from Susan. "The last queen of Narnia is dead."

And that- that makes no sense, either. Even in the aftermath of their disappearance, even though their heir had still been young, there had been a succession. She knows as much from records they’d dug up after Caspian’s coronation. And even with the Telmarines … their obsession with bloodlines meant their line should have lasted down through the ages. Unless so much time had passed between then and when she is now … It would certainly explain her reception here, and how drastically much Narnia seems to have changed ...

But no, she thinks, forcing her racing thoughts to obey. She’s seen first hand the differences time had wrought on Narnia. The land she'd seen during the hectic rush to secure Caspian's throne had been a strange variation on a theme she knew as well as her own skin. If that much time had passed again, surely she would be able to see it in the land, smell it on the air. But she _knows_ these hills, this sky, the taunting scent lurking beneath the aching cold of the air around her. They’re familiar to her, as much as they had been when she spent her first life here.

The Satyr shakes his head, ignoring her glare. “I say-“

A single loud, echoing howl cuts through the falling dark, ripping through his words like a knife. Everyone in the clearing freezes, and Susan can see the Satyr’s eyes blow wide and terrified as the leading sound is suddenly joined by the rising cries of two, three, four more Wolves.

It takes a moment, disorientation and exhaustion working to confuse what Susan knows, deep in her bones, but she knows this sound, knows the pattern. It wraps around her like a noose and the breath catches in her throat, remembering, remembering …

_Oh_.

The realization is like surging out of the ocean, like taking her first real breath of air after too long under water. _Of course_ it’s familiar. Of course it is. She knows these hills, knows that sound. Knows why there’s no king or queen in Cair Paravel. It should be impossible, but less than a half day ago she was walking down a London street, trying to decide if a cuppa in her landlady’s warm flat was worth the woman’s increasingly concerned fussing. She’ll worry about _how_ she’s here later. It’s enough that she is, because if she knows these hills, knows this sounds—and she does—then she knows what else is here.

“ _Jadis_ ,” she hisses.

Three pair of eyes lock on her, their expressions a mix of startled or vindicated, but she can’t be bothered with them now. It’s not just _a_ winter, it’s _the_ Winter. And somewhere out there, in this frozen world she’s created for herself, is the Witch.

In the rising dark of the Long Winter, the Wolves howl again.


End file.
